His and Hers Inkwells: 1500

Wells of inspiration, inspiring new applications for modern technology.

Special thanks to Robert Swader for design assistance and 3D printing and to T. Rock Mackie's Medical Devices laboratory, Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery.

Literary Perspective (Catherine DeRose): Women writers were prolific, respected, and best-selling authors in Victorian England. Men no longer dominated the market. But while both sexes were writing in great numbers, were they writing with the same vocabularies? “His and Hers Inkwells: 1500” represents Victorian Eyes’s initial foray into this question. The sample corpus was small and will need to be expanded for more definitive results, but even in this early stage, the results are intriguing. The list of words that only appear in the male corpus largely deal with war and employment, whereas the words in the female corpus tend to be related to religion and dialect.

2. and from the following novels authored by men: Trollope The Small House At Allington 1864, Trollope Framley Parsonage 1861, Trollope Doctor Thorne 1858, Trollope Can You Forgive Her 1864, Thackeray Vanity Fair 1848, Thackeray The Virginians 1858, Thackeray The Newcomes 1854, Thackeray The History Of Pendennis 1849, Hardy The Return Of The Native 1878, Hardy Far From The Madding Crowd 1874, Hardy A Pair Of Blue Eyes 1873, Dickens The Personal History Of David Copperfield 1850, Dickens Our Mutual Friend 1865, Dickens Little Dorrit 1857, Dickens Great Expectations 1861, Dickens Bleak House 1853, Dickens A Tale of Two Cities 1859, Collins The Woman In White 1860, Collins The Moonstone 1868, Collins No Name 1862

5. A significant portion of the top frequency unique words came from slang words used in dialogue, we made a decision to exclude these words

6. since the entire list would not fit on our replica victorian 3D printed inkwells, we ran each list as a "restrict to" list for its correlating group of novels and gathered info on the highest frequencies